Thursday, April 1, 2010

Welcome to April, National Poetry Month & 30/30

Art Amok invites you to place your 30 poems in 30 days here. With luck, each day a main post will be made here.Feel free to leave your poem as a comment for all to read. (For special formats, you can send the poem to me or Gus and we can post it on the main page). You can leave your poem for the day under the day's post or your can leave it under a specific writing prompt post if you've used one of those.Sometimes the daily post will be a poem, just a hello or a poem cross-posting.It's all poems for poetry month! (If you are doing haikus, to count as a full day's poem, there need to be a series of 5, like the first syllables of a haiku).

Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house.We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the roomswith things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawersclosed to hide tiny beds where children once sleptor big drawers that yawn open to revealprecisely folded garments washed half to death,unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.There must be a kitchen, and the kitchenmust have a stove, perhaps a big iron onewith a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceilingto reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions.This was the center of whatever family lifewas here, this and the sink gone yellowaround the drain where the water, dirty or pure,ran off with no explanation, somehow like the pointof this, the story we promised and may yet deliver.Make no mistake, a family was here. You seethe path worn into the linoleum where the wood,gray and certainly pine, shows through.Father stood there in the middle of his lifeto call to the heavens he imagined above the roofmust surely be listening. When no one answeredyou can see where his heel came down againand again, even though he'd been taughtnever to demand. Not that life was especially cruel;they had well water they pumped at first,a stove that gave heat, a mother who stoodat the sink at all hours and gazed longinglyto where the woods once held the voicesof small bears—themselves a family—and the songsof birds long fled once the deep woods surrenderedone tree at a time after the workmen arrivedwith jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sillis where Mother rested her head when no one saw,those two stained ridges were handholdsshe relied on; they never let her down.Where is she now? You think you have a rightto know everything? The children tiny enoughto inhabit cupboards, large enough to have roomsof their own and to abandon them, the fatherwith his right hand raised against the sky?If those questions are too personal, then tell us,where are the woods? They had to have beenbecause the continent was clothed in trees.We all read that in school and knew it to be true.Yet all we see are houses, rows and rowsof houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishesinto nothing, into the new world no one has seen,there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particlesof burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.

the ship of fools arriveswith jokes between the ramsand taurusesand some of us are chargedwith breaking out the quillsdipping themto be seers and heard

literal geese honk through a post midnight skyand i make a list of words i will try not to useand know i will fail for the next 30 days:gums will want their mouths, teeth, tonguesveins their bloodribs would be but cold, cadaverous boneswithout the drum of heartlines in palms to tell the fortunes of hands and fingerprints

i've already mentioned flight, geese,skyand though i will try to be successful with specificityas to kind of birdflamingos, kestrals,ibises and herons will allwand wings and feathers

i will do my bestto record dreams and make real events obscurewith words and abstractsto make pretty placeholdersfor constant revision beyondapril's foolishness.

I wish I were a guy.No, it's not that.I don't want to bea guy. I don't wantto look at a womanand say, "Shorty"or "Hi, lil lady."I don't want to lean to a dudeand say "huh, want tohit that, uhn." I don't wantto do like that. I don't wantto be walking with my budsin a hallway, lit yellowwith flickering lights, inthe bellies under night clubs and say,"I'd like a black chick, I'd like toslap her around." I don't wantto do like that. I don'twant to walk up behinda woman who is just filingand sorting, but who isbending over -- I don'twant to walk up behinda woman and say, "Areyou working or tryingto stick your butt in my face?"I don't want topay a woman less, because I can.I don't want to sayboys get college, girlsjust get married.I don't want to do like that.

It's also true that I appreciate a man'sbody, I like the way the shoulders move.I like them like that.I appreciate the vervewhen he gets along with me,swimming with my tide. Swim with me, guy.

I like the way their shirtshang, and their hands, calloused or knobby,or thick with fingers lay ona arm or fish around a coatpocket. Fish for me, guy. Fish.

I wish I werea guy so I'd be the kindof guy who doesn't do that otherstuff, that enough of them do. Iwish what "enough of them do"didn't happen to any of us.

So swim with me guy, fish with me,be with me, guy, and Iwill be with youeven if I am the womanand you are the manmaking me like beingthe way I am.

i wrote this before i went to sleep...i really like Rudy Francisco's poem actually n he's one of my favorites...sometimes i just like being an asshole because i miss being a Battle MC :-/...this came from a convo Karen G and I had a week ago about the Numbers poems showing up a lot now...

socks in his writing, synesthesia permeated----to her---a stench------his juvenile words---------------so many should have just written the word penis over and over and over again----my dick, my girl, the world according to my---instead of trying to invent sentences ---------underwear hanging loose